Touching Lives - July 2008

Jargon busters

Bronchioles You may have heard it
said that the area inside your lungs, in
which the gas exchange takes place, is
the size of a tennis court, and this may
well be true! The lungs hold a very large
number of tiny sacs called alveoli,
arranged rather like the leaves on a tree.
The air gets to and from these sacs
through a branching system of tubes
starting with the windpipe (trachea), and
branching into the two bronchi, which in
turn branch and branch again until they
come to the very last ones leading into
the alveoli. These are the bronchioles.

Enzymes Think of enzymes as
biochemical tools. They can change a
substance, like a protein eaten as food,
into something the body requires —
without getting used up in the process.
Just like a carpenter using his hammer
and saw over and over again to process
many pieces of wood. Thousands of
different enzymes are used by the body;
without them nothing could be
achieved. It would be like a world
without tools.

Neutrophils There are something like
five million cells in every cubic millimetre
(or micro-litre) of blood, most of which
are red blood cells. However, about
4,000 are white blood cells, and the
majority of these are neutrophils.
Neutrophils represent both the first-line
army and the weapons which the body
uses to fight invasion by bacteria. A
chemical message is received that
bacteria are about and the neutrophils
rush to the scene, able to penetrate the
walls of blood capillaries in the process,
in order to reach the tissues. They ‘eat’
the bacteria using chemicals (often
enzymes) in granules that they carry to
kill them. The neutrophils sacrifice
themselves in the process, but there is a
factory in the bone marrow which
continuously produces more.